By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.

By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.

You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

Strom-meter: *** = Hey, not bad. One notch below very cool

Key features: Pros: Easy and simple to use
Eliminates the majority of spam e-mails
Whitelist and blacklist entries

Cons: Getting started with your whitelists will take some patience

Description: Last month,
I described a few of the anti-spam products that I have been using. Since then, and thanks to your diligence, I have come across many others and dutifully tried them all out. I want to tell you about my current favorite, called MailWasher, which does a very good job and is the best of the breed, as far as I can see.

Lucky for you I get tons of spam a day, a fountain of porn, make-money-fast and personal letters from Sub-Saharan African "officials" that can be directed at these various products. I didn't realize what an ideal test environment I had until I delved into this area.

The anti-spam products fall into one of three general categories:

1) Peer-to-peer products like SpamNet and Matador, which operate inside your Outlook or Outlook Express program and process the mail as it arrives to that program. While these products do a reasonable job, they are slow and somewhat frustrating to operate. In addition to the two I reviewed last month, there is also IhateSpam from Sunbelt Software, NUCEM from HelpMeSoft.com, SpamAssassin from Deersoft.com (which also works with Exchange servers) and Spamnix.com (which works only with Eudora and not Outlook/OE). I am less keen on this category since trying these all out, and you'll see why in a moment.

2) Mail service providers that do the screening on the front end of their systems, so when you get around to reading your mail, the spam never hits your inbox. An alternative to this is one of several corporate-level products that can do the same thing for an entire business' e-mail population. I wish more ISPs would implement products like this, but in the meantime, you can sign up at any number of sources, including Usermail.com, BlueBottle.com, MailShell.com and Spamex.com (that has an interesting "one-time" e-mail address feature). Some of these service providers make use of Web-based gateways for you to read your mail, which can be cumbersome. And while the idea of having a filter on the front end of your mail system is the right way to go, it means you might have to change your e-mail identity or ISP to take advantage of this feature.

3) Standalone screening products that work against any POP-based mail server. This is where MailWasher comes into play, and where I think you should be, too. McAfee's SpamKiller is another product here, but it is a bit more complex and cumbersome to operate than Mailwasher, although it has more features.

I was initially hot on the P2P products in the first category, but the more I used them, the less I thought of them. Part of the problem is that they take too darned long to go through your messages. In the amount of time required, I could have easily deleted the messages. Part of the problem is that they don't do much to eliminate spam from the source: They just delete it from your inbox. There are noteworthy exceptions: NUCEM sends messages to abuse@domain.com whenever you mark a message as spam. That sounds great, but then you have to deal with the automatically generated messages from the abuse department thanking you for notifying them -- just what you need, MORE useless e-mail. And I had problems running these products against my IMAP mail server (except for SpamAssassin -- that seemed to work just fine but did manage to render my one of my machines with Windows 2000 running Outlook 2000 completely inoperable).

So what does Mailwasher actually do? It is a separate program (and thankfully, all contained in a single executable file -- a nice touch) that will connect to multiple mail servers and scan your headers. You can delete messages, mark them as spam and bounce them back, or mark them as friendly and add the sender to your whitelist.

Marking the messages as spam and having them bounce is good, because this is probably the fastest way to signal to the spammer that you no longer exist. It isn't foolproof (and probably by the time you read this some spammer will have figured a workaround), but it does get to the source of the spam itself.

A nice feature of MailWasher is that you can preview the message without having to download it with your e-mail program: Just double-click on the message and a separate window pops up with the message contents.

A couple of my newsletter subscriptions were marked as potential spam by the program -- but that was easy enough to fix, just right click on them and mark these as friendly, and it won't make this mistake any longer.

So what does this cost? You don't have to pay anything, but I recommend you contribute something to the author -- he has a fee schedule on his Web site, but since the commercial programs go for about $30, that might be a good place to start if you like the software and find it useful.

I am sure that there are other spam cleaners out there that I haven't tried yet. But for now, I am sticking with MailWasher. It does the job and operates quickly enough, even on a slower 300-MHz Pentium.

Strom-meter key: **** = Very cool, very useful *** = Hey, not bad. One notch below very cool ** = A tad shaky to install and use but has some value. * = Don't waste your time. Minimal real value.

About the author David Strom is the senior technology editor for VAR Business magazine. He has tested hundreds of computer products over the past two decades working as a computer journalist, consultant and corporate IT manager. Since 1995, he has written a weekly series of essays on Web technologies and marketing called Web Informant. You can send him e-mail at dstrom@cmp.com.

0 comments

Register

Login

Forgot your password?

Your password has been sent to:

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy